Étiquette : digital networks

You Already Use Artificial Intelligence

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , 4 commentaires

The Real Impact of AI on Art and Culture

Black-and-white cube symbolizing the circulation of culture through digital networks, featuring the silhouette of a human observer. Illustration for the micro-essay "You Already Use Artificial Intelligence."

Read this article in French:
Vous utilisez déjà l’intelligence artificielle

An everyday moment:

You log on.

You are looking for something to read. You ask a search engine a question. A streaming platform recommends a film. An artificial intelligence suggests new cultural discoveries.

A few seconds later, it feels as though you have simply found what you were looking for.

Yet something important has just happened…

You have encountered culture in a way that is very different from how your parents or grandparents did.

For centuries, we have discovered culture and knowledge through mediators: a library, a bookseller, a teacher, a critic… or simply a friend.

Like many people of my generation, I spent years discovering culture exclusively through human mediators.

Today, new mediators have joined this long history… and they are no longer human.

Who now guides our cultural discoveries?

Global culture has become a continuous flow in motion.

Works of art, books, films, articles and ideas no longer circulate only through libraries, booksellers, critics and cultural institutions.

They now move through a vast network where search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence also help shape their circulation.

In reality, we have already been accompanied for decades by new mediators that quietly organize part of our encounters with culture.

Whether we realize it or not, we already use artificial intelligence when we search the Internet, watch a video on YouTube, receive a recommendation for a film, a song, a book or an article, or simply when social media platforms decide what appears in our news feeds.

The greatest impact of artificial intelligence is not its ability to create images, texts or music. Its greatest impact lies in its role as a mediator, helping shape our cultural discoveries and the circulation of works, ideas and knowledge.

The mediators are changing. Increasingly, they take the form of search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence.

Our desire to discover, share and pass on culture, however, remains profoundly human.

📚 View all Micro-Essays

This text is part of the series Understanding Today’s Culture, a chronicle of global networked culture.

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Further Reading

🟦 Everyone Already Uses AI

🟦 How Far Can a Publication Go?

🟦 Who Will Shape Cultural and Artistic Recognition Tomorrow?

🟦 The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation – Algorithms That Organize Global Culture

🟦 You Already Choose Your Culture

🟦 You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

🟦 Understanding Today’s Culture – View All Micro-Essays

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Publishing Is Not Enough. You Also Need the Chance to Be Seen.

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , 2 commentaires

The Path from Visibility to Encounter

Multilingual mosaic of the word culture, young woman walking through a digital stream of online content and platforms, illustrating visibility, discoverability and cultural encounters in global networked culture.

Read this article in French:
Publier ne suffit plus. Encore faut-il pouvoir être vu.

A scene from everyday life:

I log in…

I publish a photo.

A text.

A video.

A reflection.

Sometimes what I publish is quickly seen and shared.

Sometimes it seems to disappear almost immediately.

Yet those posts still exist.

Today, billions of posts circulate through digital networks. Never before have so many people been able to share their ideas, knowledge, experiences, creations and discoveries so easily. Publishing has become an everyday act.

But publishing is no longer enough.

You also need the chance to be seen.

In my own case, I have been publishing artistic works and reflective essays on the Web for more than twenty years. Some quickly find their audience. Others seem to disappear into the digital limbo. There is nothing unusual about this experience. Today, anyone can see that some publications circulate widely while others remain almost invisible.

At its core, this is a deeply human experience. Publishing, communicating, hoping to be seen, to be discovered and to reach an audience have always been part of cultural transmission.

Throughout history, human beings have sought to pass on ideas, knowledge, experiences and creative works. Transmission is one of the great threads running through human history. The digital world did not create this aspiration. It has simply become its newest chapter.

In a world where everyone can publish, visibility has become a genuine cultural issue. Without visibility, ideas, knowledge and creative works may never reach the people who could give them new life.

What has changed with the digital age is the path that transmission now follows. Search engines, digital platforms and artificial intelligence have become new mediators between content and the people who may discover it. Today, this capacity to make content discoverable across the vastness of the Web has a name: discoverability.

Ultimately, visibility is not an end in itself. Being seen only truly matters when an idea reaches a curious mind, when knowledge finds someone who was looking for it, when a text, an image or a piece of music encounters a person who gives it new life through reading, listening, reflection or sharing.

Visibility makes it possible to be seen.

Discoverability makes it possible to be found.

Encounter is the true goal.

Culture has always lived through encounters.

📚 View All Micro-Essays

This text is part of the series Understanding Today’s Culture, a cultural chronicle of global networked culture.

→ Back to the Micro-Essays page

Further Reading

🟦 You Publish… But Are You Really Seen?

🟦 Global Culture as a Moving Mosaic

🟦  Inhabiting the Network — A New Human Condition in Global Culture

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor